Razer to Honour OUYA’s Debts to Developers

Yesterday reports revealed that following the sale of OUYA’s software and technical team to peripheral maker, Razer, OUYA told developers that the money they owed them as part of the Free the Games Fund, will not be honoured. Further reports suggested OUYA remained to pay a total of $600,000 to multiple developers, which was a pretty big sum. Thankfully, Razer has stepped up and has said that they’ll honour OUYA’s debts.

OUYA’s Free the Games Fund has been wrapped in controversy from the very beginning from developers cheating the system, to OUYA changing the rules half way through, and now this. The idea was that OUYA was to use $1 million to help smaller developers further fund their games, but things just went from bad to worse.

Initially developers were required to conjure up $50,000 of crowdfunding bucks, which was then changed to $10,000 with at least 100 backers, then OUYA revealed that upon release of a beta, developers would receive 50 per cent of the cash OUYA promised, then upon full release a futher 25 per cent, then finally once an exclusive period was over, the final 25 per cent would be paid.

OUYA then began asking developers to sign another contract when they launched their beta which simply said that if either party were to disappear OUYA has the right to terminate the agreement.

This is when things went tits up.

Fortunately Razer hopes to make good on the promises OUYA had made. Speaking with Polygon, Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan, revealed that he’d been getting down to the bottom of things for most of the day yesterday despite travelling to the ChinaJoy game show.

It’s a pretty lengthy article that goes into some detail as to what Razer actually acquired as well as what they propose to do in the future, specifically with developers. The short of it is however, Razer “will be backing the new Ouya publishing arm. So we are going to try and make good on this fund and give these developers an option,” Said Min-Liang.

There are a few exceptions which aren’t all that bad, but the fact that Razer are doing something about this, despite not actually being legally obliged to do so, is a great thing.